OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #123, APRIL 26, 2023

 

WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #123, APRIL 26, 2023
John Bellamy Foster.  The Pentagon, Abrupt Climate Change, and Ecological Emergency.
Abolishing Nuclear Weapons
Ground Zero
Nukewatch Quarterly
InThese Times

The Ecological Emergency, the Pentagon, and US National Security
John Bellamy Foster. The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  MR, 2009.
     Foster is one of the most brilliant of living scholars with over a dozen books while editing a major journal.  What he conveys in Chapter 5, “The Pentagon and Climate Change,” possesses critical importance still today.  Foster discusses global warming, then assesses abrupt climate change and its inherent social dangers, and finally he explains how the present economic system is a barrier to solution.  The fearsome possibility exists, as the IPCC had reported and some Pentagon scientists understood, for climate change of a barely imaginable scale and suddenness, resulting not from gradual change but from “disruption of the thermohaline circulation” of the Atlantic Ocean (110).  The Pentagon engaged Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to prepare a study, which became the momentous Oct. 2003 report, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.   It called into question the conventional belief that cc would be gradual, and it seriously engaged with and dramatized the science of abrupt change.  It “elevated,” it gave authority to the threat throughout the government.   And the 2003 report recognizes the added danger of convergence of war and warming: “as the world’s carrying capacity declines under harsh climatic condition, warfare becomes widespread—producing increased dangers of thermonuclear war” (114).
     We must abolish the weapons.

ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Clear Voices from Print Magazines
Ground Zero (April 2023). Offers 7 significant articles; for example.
Leonard Eiger, “Celebrate Earth Day & Mother’s Day with Ground Zero,” connects the dots.  “While climate change and the threat of nuclear war are the two major threats to the future of humankind and life on our planet, their solutions are similar”—international cooperation.   GZ keeps its eye on the prize by celebrating ED for world peace and Julia Ward Howe’s original intention of Mother’s Day for Peace (OMNI celebrated Howe’s Day for several years; will you take it on?  We must cooperate at every opportunity for peace, and not be distracted.)   Another: A review of Jeanne Clark’s memoir, All the Way In: A Story of Activism, Incarceration, and Organic Farming, which includes her protests against those horrific ballistic missile Trident submarines near Seattle.  (Ground Zero, like OMNI, is a permanent center for peace; become a member of both.)   

Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring 2023).  Outstandingly valuable magazine, this number  contains 14 articles (plus a page of “Shorts”).  Examples: by Lindsay Potter, a brief, perfectly clear appraisal of the present condition of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), concluding that nuclear arsenals still able to cause a human and environmental apocalypse “begs the usefulness of any treaty that does not require elimination of all nuclear weapons”; by Benjamin and Davies, “What Can the United States Bring to the Peace Table for Ukraine?” (support Ukrainian neutrality, lift sanctions against Russia, reduce troops in Europe, remove its missiles, and more; we know how to stop the war, and the US can do it).

Frida Berrigan.  “The End of the World Is Back: Why We Need a New Generation of Nuclear Abolitionists.”  In These Times (Jan.-Feb. 2023).  US Ohio class submarines are in the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic “within range of Russia.”  President Putin said Russia would use “all the means” at its disposal to “defend” itself against NATO’s encirclement.  The Russians and the US have over 4,000 nuclear warheads each.  A nuclear war could dump 150 million tons of soot into the atmosphere of “nuclear winter,” drastically curtailing food production.  We urgently need nuclear disarmament.  Our leaders have failed to accomplish it.  It’s up to the people.  Will you spend the next decade as part of the problem, or will you join the necessary mass movement?
Frida Berrigan, “Living with World's End in Plain Sight.”  Ground Zero.

https://www.gzcenter.org › frida-berrigan-living-with-w...  Frida lives in the shadow of General Dynamics Electric Boat, which built the first generation of Trident submarines, and is building the next generation. 
“How to Survive Our Apocalyptic Future.”  The Nation.

https://www.thenation.com › Article   Nov 8, 2022 — Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs in the Family.

[These organizations and their magazines and social protests together could save our civilization, if a majority of our populace listened to and acted on their hope.  –Dick]